Adventures with Fido, by Lucas C. Wheeler

One of the interesting features of interactive fiction is that the medium is adaptable to a wide variety of genres. “Adventures with Fido” is an unusual attempt to make a single-player MUD or MMORPG in choice-based text adventure format.

Gameplay: The goal of the game is to collect bones available throughout the setting. The game world is much larger than I expected, containing several distinct subareas with puzzles and quests. New areas are opened up through randomly after repeatedly exploring areas, by boosting hidden stats through repeated interactions with certain items, or by solving puzzles. Although the scope of the game was impressive, I didn’t enjoy much of its exploration. The randomness of the game bothered me, and tasks like arithmetic or geology quizzes were completely uninteresting. Maybe fans of MUDs and that style of game would have a better time, but I didn’t enjoy the game. 3/10.

Mechanics: It’s impressive to see such a variety of game mechanics in a single work, and I didn’t encounter any serious bugs with them. It’s somewhat unusual to have puzzles in a purely choice-based format; most of the them are handled by interacting with an object in one location and then using the consequence of that interaction elsewhere (e.g., in entering the Cloud Kingdom). It’s hard to get excited about quizzes, especially when there are so few unique questions that I never finished a five-question set without getting a duplicate. There are other kinds of puzzles, though, as well as quests and other achievements. 7/10.

Presentation: The tone matched the cheerful hyperactivity of its Corgi protagonist, though the length of the game caused it to grate after a while. There weren’t many detailed interactions with NPCs, but the canine nature of the protagonist showed through in the scenes. 5/10.

You might be interested in this game if: You like Corgis and combatless MMORPGs.